If Only They Covered That in Engineering School
If you ever want to see a clear justification for log scales in graphs, take a look at a 40-year chart for the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
If you ever want to see a clear justification for log scales in graphs, take a look at a 40-year chart for the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Last.FM just announced that their service has become subscription-only for customers outside the US and a few select other countries. So, scrobbling support suddenly becomes a very low priority in a portable media player.
Eating baklava at one’s desk requires more care than I am typically wont to give.
It’s pretty darn fascinating to watch the media begin to recover from the shakeout. Not to say this is over; I think we have at least one more “first you say it, then you do it” panic in the wings. Funds managers are about to unload their cash reserves back into equities, which will drive a horrible overreaction from individual investors trying to grab the momentum upward.
The media’s little advice columns are kind of refreshing in a way. They’re kind of on my talking points: dangers of personal leverage, treating debt capacity as savings, etc.
We need to have regulation that changes the name of “home equity loan” to “second mortgage,” the more traditional term if I see things correctly. “Home Equity” implies you’re tapping into something that is yours (like a realized gain on something). “Second Mortgage” implies you are getting further into debt, albeit secured debt. There’s nothing wrong with the loans when used properly and in light of true (emergency) need. But people need to realize that if they consider their home a cash machine, they need to account for the ATM fees.
My own learnings are a bit more theoretical in nature, but they center around the following:
Purchase price averaging: Be level-headed, but stay in the game. Buy slowly and steadily, especially in payroll-deducted investments.
Dividends: You know, those things that aren’t on the stock charts? They make everything slant upward.
Contrarianism: It can go too way far, but when CNBC starts dropping confetti, try to have second thoughts.
Timing: Psychological poison. Try not to march into gunfire, but realize it’s essentially hopeless.
Chasing Performance: By the time a stock or fund’s performance becomes notable, you’ve probably already missed the boat.
Commodity Prices: More tied to currency parity than you would ever think.
You almost have to stop and listen when Zed Shaw writes, and he has in recent times adopted a more people-friendly personality. He wrote a favorable article about Django that really captured my attention over the weekend.
I’m sure part of it is the interest of reading a Ruby/Rails self-exile’s thoughts on Python. I try not to get too religious about Python, but the more I write it and read it, the more I really believe in its power. Python 3000 seems like it will be outstanding, and I look forward to porting Sigma over when the time is right (we won’t have very many deprecated features, probably just some string library fixes and maybes some class tweaks).
Another point of interest is my prior work on the PHP CMS, which, while a resounding success in terms of final code quality and design elegance, was a painful write. I believe I first became familiar with the term CRUD while coding the engine. It’s a humbling amount of “stupid code” to implement a truly user-facing interface to everything, even in something as basic as a CMS with minimal features.
What if the user types a letter into a number field? Input validation (especially in the filth of PHP syntax and structure) and edge-case prediction becomes your life. It’s not pleasant. You write ten lines of straight business logic and float on air for a week.
So then I read about Django, and how you just plug junk in and get an administration site. Then you realize that all this stuff is so ripe for code reuse its amazing people haven’t done better making that happen.
The boilerplating that Ruby on Rails does seems really cool in the tutorial, and then you start with the “but I’m special because…” stuff and realize a lot has to be redone. I’m sure with more familiarity it would feel similar to the impression I get from Django, but RoR felt weird to me for some reason, maybe just because Ruby has always felt weird to me.
[As an aside, my feeling about Ruby is like if you were to design a tonal language for general communication. And you had a way to write it down, but you instead encourage people to talk it as much as possible. And, you designed the language such that when you recite the pledge of allegiance the tones arrange themselves to play Yankee Doodle. And every time you teach anyone your language you teach them the pledge of allegiance because you know everyone will see how cool it is that such a thing could just work out.
Then, your student takes his stuff home and tries to write an English report with it. He figures out that he (1) has to write it down, and (2) reading it out loud sounds like cats fighting outside his window. The student blames himself, assuming there is some way to put everything together such that the tone is beautiful. But the cartoon foxes don’t prove as helpful as one might think…
Anyway…]
But the admin interface… seriously, how special could it be? And it’s not like you can’t make changes. It seems like Django lets the admin stuff kind of demand-pull the proper stuff into the generated pages. It seems gorgeous.
I wonder how little time it would have taken to implement the CMS in Django. I wonder how many lines of code…
One of the biggest tells when we’re trying to play Turkish is that it appears Americans are somewhat unique in saying “whoa” as a basic nonutterance of mild surprise.
I think the more Turkish thing is to go something like “oooo” or “aaaa.” But “whoa” is American.
Theory: The “wh” sound in “whoa” is based on the question words what, when, where, and why. Since Turkish for a snap “What?” question is “Ne?” (said like “Nay?”), this “wh” thing isn’t in the consciousness the same way.
Well, it seems the US is basing its prosperity on leverage, wherever it can find it.
Making a good bit of money? Why not bet on your own good health and downsize your medical plan? Just to make sure you still go bankrupt when something bad happens.
Or, you can be a patriot and go for the gold plan, getting taxed to high heaven for the privilege.
How this is looking to me, past and future:
People leveraged up making bets on the health of their house values (and second house’s values, and on and on, of course).
Banks leveraged up making bets on Joe Martinez.
The government leveraged up making bets on banks.
The government actually has to pay for this (what rolls downhill?).
The government raises taxes on health benefits (the #1 source of the climbing consumption spending in the US economy, by the way, not flat screen televisions).
People leverage up making bets on their good health.
Insurance companies leverage up making bets on Joe Martinez.
Someone spits in Joe Martinez’s eye (how did that happen?).
Joe Martinez bankrupts himself trying to pay his deductible…
… which bankrupts the insurance company making their bet on him …
… which causes the government to inflate the currency bailing out the insurance company.
This morning I was trying to find a humorous term for a person with limited perspective who is overly and impractically consumed with mundane details while missing the larger point.
Google failed me…
I give you the dangers of learning a language without support.
The first option (çok güzel kız) translates to “very pretty girl.” Don’t like where that’s going…
The second option (fıstık) translates directly to “pistachio.” If they had said “fıstık gibi” (“like a pistachio”), that appears to be like saying “that’s great.”
The third option (gammazlamak) is a verb that means to inform on someone.
Ah, and there we are, şeftali, the word I originally looked up because it’s on my can of fruit juice every lunchtime. But it can also mean nectarine.
Kitapsız, by the way, means “without a book” and can apparently figuratively imply atheist. Traps abound.
Sigh.
I am remiss for not doing this sooner, but whatever is wrong with Cluster 2.0 has been fixed manually and Josh’s post is now actually there. It now falls to me…